For practically the whole spring semester and up until recently, a few of my fungal strains have been acting up. It is quite distressing when an experiment you’ve done 10’s to 100’s of times suddenly stops working and you don’t know why. You’ve done everything the same as before, so what gives?! Fungi, being the funky little beings they are, sometimes do odd things if their spores have been in the fridge too long, passaged too many times, or even get a random mutation. We have stocks in out -80C freezer for this very purpose– to start from scratch, so to speak. I don’t vibe with non-fungal organisms, but I think similar things can happen to animal cell lines. I want to say some can lose specially-designed phenotypes, stop dividing, and become genetically unstable.

Well, despite growing new batches from the stocks in the freezer, I was still having issues. I remember one night having a breakdown from doing a large-scale experiment for the third time, only to see the issues were still arising. To me, it is one thing to stay late to get something done, but another to stay late and have the experiment to fail for the third time at no fault of your own. Or, so I thought…

I actually never figured out what happened, or if it’s even fully resolved. All I know is suddenly a couple of the experiments I did worked properly and I didn’t question it. Prior, I went through every possible experimental condition in my control, from making new media to triple counting my spores, to no avail. When I spoke with my PI for some guidance, he told me this has happened before to him in his career and that it randomly resolved mid-remaking the strains. “Maybe Mercury is in retrograde right now?” was not response I was looking for.

It sometimes comes down to the things we can’t see or measure. A paper I read for a lab meeting recently looks at how media affects the cell wall of Cryptococcus, changing even how infection plays out in mice. Same cells, same everything else, just what type of media they were grown in before being used. If you want to read the paper, it is linked here. It makes me wonder if some tiny, tiny change, maybe the pressure of the air or that the fridge was a degree off or something, caused such disaster in my own work.

In a similar way, it also makes me wonder what tiny factors in our day-to-day life affect us. Maybe when people say something about horoscopes, that the stars are not aligned properly or however else it is “measured,” there is actually something imperceivable going on. I think of how in the book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, a traveling group shows the town ice and magnets for the first time, but to them this is some sort of magic as they had never seen these items before. A cold, clear crystal? A rock that pulls spoons to it? Something could happen that we just don’t have a word for. Or maybe we are affected like my fungi, giving our scientist-god a headache when we don’t feel and act how we should or want to. Or maybe my fungi are just trying to stress me out enough such that I perish and they can consume me. Who knows?

Happy reading,
-Beppa